I will never stop being entertained and/or completely creeped out by the search queries that lead to my blog:
I want so badly to know what the unknown search terms are each day, guys. So badly.
Tonight will be an interesting test; my nerdery will be put head-to-head against my advancing age and inertia. I want to stay up to preorder an iPhone 6 (12:01 AM provided no technical issues, and we allll know there are gonna be technical issues) but I am old and I like sleep and I have to work tomorrow. Will I make it? Or will I go “fuck it,” and get up a little early tomorrow, and maybe omg end of world have to wait an extra week for my new shiny to arrive?
Keep in mind that I waited in line for three days for tickets for Episode One, and do not regret it. I am an old hand at this shit. The problem is the “old” bit is literal.
How complicated would it be to host my books myself and sell them through the site? I’m competent enough to know that I’d need server space and some sort of software package to handle the sales, but not competent enough to know how simple/expensive it is to acquire and set that up.
(By “myself,” I don’t mean “physically host a server in my house,” unless physically hosting a server in my house is easier than I think it is. I’m just wondering about ways to sell my books that put 100% of the sale into my pocket rather than the cut Amazon might give me.)
…and we’ll see if what comes out in any way resembles a blog post worth reading.
So Benevolence Archives hasn’t been selling well lately. And by “hasn’t been selling well,” I mean “has sold one copy in the last thirty days.” Now, if I were to make a list of things that also have not happened in the last thirty days, “took even the slightest step to market Benevolence Archives” would have to be on the list, so this isn’t a waah waah poor me no one loves me type of post. The book’s not selling right now because I’m not putting it in people’s faces and trying to sell it. There are consequences to actions. It’ll be OK.
What’s interesting: a couple of weeks ago, having already noted this trend, I shrugged and set the book to perma-free at Smashwords. I am starting to think that Smashwords isn’t even a real website, by the way, because even that caused it to move no copies, and the site now helpfully informs me that despite making no sales I am owed sixty-one cents by… someone. ‘K. Why did I do this? Because I want the book free at Amazon, and I’ve been informed by numerous reliable people that the way to perma-free your book at Amazon is to make it permanently free at Smashwords, and then their magical Internet goblins notice and match the price.
They, uh, have not matched the price, despite the fact that I specifically ratted myself out to them. Which is part of the reason I haven’t mentioned the book much around here lately, because “SPEND MONEY TO BUY MY BOOK BEFORE IT’S FREE FOREVER!” seems kinda rude, y’know? But they won’t make it free.
No one is more surprised than me– mostly because no one but me cares– to discover that Apple’s big nerd prom today has probably sold me a Pebble Steel. I love my Pebble– it is, hands down, my favorite piece of technology since my first cell phone– but I was fully expecting to trade it in for Apple’s smart watch when they finally got around to introducing one, mostly on account of I’m wearing what looks like a piece of cheap plastic on my wrist. I didn’t want an iWatch because of the functionality; I wanted one because it would look more like a watch a grown-up should be wearing.
Reactions are unsurprisingly mixed, but I love the look of the thing, and I love the word “fluoroelastomer,” but I don’t love the fact that they didn’t mention battery life other than, apparently, claiming that you’d charge it “every night.” I have gotten used to wearing a watch to bed because my watch is also my alarm clock. I don’t ever want to be awakened by a sound again, folks; that’s how much better a wrist vibration is as an alarm clock. It’s wonderful. And if the Apple Watch doesn’t have at a minimum four or five days in between charges (which is about what I get with the Pebble) I don’t want it. I won’t spend $350 (minimum!) on a watch that I can’t use as an alarm clock. That’s half the reason I have a smart watch.
Now, the iPhone 6, on the other hand, is an auto-buy. My phone is reaching the end of its useful life (I’m having to have to have a charging cord with me at all times) and plus I’ve long since accepted the fact that I’m the guy who gets a new phone almost every year anyway. So there is no if dimension to the upgrade, only when. And I could go into the details of the when except I’m pretty sure this post is already nerdy enough. Needless to say it involves deciding whether I’m less pissed at Sprint for having shitty service or Verizon for generically being assholes. I’m tilting toward going back to Verizon except that involves porting my number over in time to still preorder the phone, which is, uh, kinda complicated, blah blah blah nerdwank nerdwank.
(Context here, if you don’t remember who Patrick McLaw is.)
I’ve been checking back with this story every couple of days, and not much of note has surfaced since the original stories, but this is about as much new info as I’ve seen anywhere. If you were curious about the original post, check it out.
Here is how busy urgent care was last night when I finally decided I need to see a doctor right now and not wait until morning to get an appointment with my regular physician: an hour and a half before closing, there were people sitting on the goddamn floor in the reception area. I’m not gonna pretend I’ve never seen that before– I lived in Chicago for ten years, for crying out loud– but it’s been a while, and never when I wasn’t fully damn aware that we were in the middle of an epidemic of some sort.
Luckily for me, Day One of my antibiotics have decreased my misery level by a good 75%, and I’m planning on going back to work tomorrow. Last night was the first time since waking up Thursday morning that I’ve gotten more than an hour or two of sleep at a time; waking up choking on my own mouth every hour and a half and spending most of the intervening time hallucinating about properly maintaining my school’s nonexistent Twitter account and Nicki Minaj/Weird Al duets has not led to me being functional or sane at all this weekend. And I’m not joking about either of those hallucinations, and I mean hallucinations. You ever had a song running through your head so bad that you were clapping your hands over your ears to make it stop? Ever had five of them doing it at once, so loud that they were keeping you awake? When you were already so fucked up that getting your hands to your ears was probably already more than you were going to be able to manage?
That was my weekend, guys. Or at least the horrible, horrible nighttime parts of it. And that’s before we get to the sinus congestion that was so bad it was rendering me unable to talk, much less breathe or sleep. I had three meals between Friday, Saturday and Sunday combined, and none of them large.
I have, in short, not liked the last several days very much, and I suspect I will like them less when I get to work tomorrow and see what the state of my desk is.
On the plus side, I have to have all of my sick out of the way through, like, December or January now, right?
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